MICCAI 2008

The MICCAI (International Society and Conference Series on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention) conference attracted more people this year than ever before. The location was very convenient for most of the researchers; it was held in the Center for University Life of the New York University, providing an amazing view over mid-Manhattan.
The first and the last day were only workshops, and as Peter was the organizer of the one on
Systems and Architectures for CAI, we also submitted a paper with Tian. He gave the presentation on Integration of Open Source and Commercial Software for our robot. It was good to hear how open the industrial IGS providers are (at least in theory) to work together with researchers. Another great example of cooperation is the SAW (Surgical Assistance Workstation) that provides additional features to the da Vinci robot, such as real time overlaying of US or any other imaging data in the surgeon's view. Also, many free medical imaging and visualization toolkits are available supporting research and clinical use (IGSTK, ITK, MITK, etc.).
The MICCAI is traditionally single threaded, meaning that there is only one oral session at a time in a large auditorium. Unfortunately (for me) most of the sessions were focusing on imaging and modelling, and only one was about robotic applications. Dr. Sakuma's presentation from University of Tokyo was very interesting about fluoroscopic image guided robotic laser ablation. The vast majority of the papers were posters, jamed in into two rooms. Some exciting new results were publisthed on DTI and EEG signal processing. Together with the posters, there were industrial exhibitors, namely the NDI, Medtronic, Siemens, Claron and few others. They mostly presented their optical and magnetic tracking products. Next year, MICCAI will be in London, hosted by the Imperial College. Hopefully, it will be even more accessible to people.